It would be nice when the scripting language was extended with some features known from e.g. Perl, like "split" and "regexp match with capture".
These operations would take a line of characters and either a splitting character (like a space in your case) or a regular expression describing the line and what you want to get from it, and return the results as an array holding the extracted fields.
Until then, indeed you will have to use (possibly repeated) use of find and pick.